Return of the Cuckoos

The cast of Village of the Damned, then and now. Photos: Kobal / David Levene

Letchmore Heath was, almost notoriously, a place where things did not happen. And, but for the events of winter 1959, it would have slumbered on in quiet English anonymity. Just another neat and tidy Hertfordshire village. But that was before the coming of the unearthly Cuckoos, before the invasion, before Letchmore became the Village of the Damned.

Initially released in 1960, never issued on video in the UK and unavailable on DVD anywhere, MGM's Village of the Damned has achieved its deserved cult status, ironically, via repeated television screenings throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Forget the risible remake; this quiet, understated adaptation of John Wyndham's novel The Midwich Cuckoos has succeeded in burning itself into the bad dreams of millions.

And now, decades later, the Cuckoos are back in the village they once ruled with their terrible staring eyes. Then, they were unknown, blond-haired, identical alien offspring - the result of a bit of extra-terrestrial how's-your-father that put the good folk of Midwich to sleep and all the women up the junction.

These Cuckoos nearly took over the world, or at least Macmillan's England, until good old George Sanders stopped them in their neat little tracks by merely thinking really hard about a brick wall. Well, that and a few dozen sticks of gelignite. Sanders, that cad of the movies, starts out as the perfect English eccentric but ends up a suicide bomber engaged in an act of mass infanticide that includes his own "son".

Now the Cuckoos are middle-aged and a variety of shapes, sizes and professions; caravan salesman (Peter Preidel), theatrical agent (Howard Knight), exotic nightclub owner (Carlo Cura), actor (Teri Scoble) and architect (Martin Stephens). But once they were blond, beautiful and the most terrifying children in England. Which is why broadcaster Alan Dein is grinning gleefully as they, actor Barbara Shelly and director Wolf Rilla all assemble on the picture-perfect village green.

It has taken months to track all these little devils down for a BBC Radio 4 documentary that is, effectively, the first ever biography of the elusive John Wyndham. Wyndham believed his novel utterly unfilmable and was quietly delighted with the results that Dein and his generation found so disturbing.

"I grew up watching Disney and the Children's Film Foundation," says Dein. "Children were your friends, they were fun and the grown-ups were the enemy. But not this lot. This was the first time any of us had ever seen scary children, really bad seeds, and he was the scariest of the lot. That boy gave me nightmares."

"That boy" is Martin Stephens, the baddest seed of them all. Something of a child star in his own right in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Stephens went on to essay another subtle portrait of childish menace in Jack Clayton's The Innocents. Even now, there is an aura of otherworldliness about him.

"I knew it was an unusual part. I quietly liked it... having these very adult qualities and having control over the adult. Imagine having that power - and I could taste a bit of that. You realise how powerless you are as a child. I don't think I found it too much of a stretch, that part!"

Stephens laughs and sweeps his hand across the green to point out the little lane and the brick wall that still bears the impact scars from the car and driver that he and his little gang sent hurtling to oblivion, courtesy of an intense group stare.

Wyndham's book first appeared in 1957, and this year marks the centenary of his birth. Not that anyone, apart from Radio 4, remembered in the rush to cherish Orwell. Even Penguin, who still keep all of Wyndham's titles in print, managed to forget the man who put the genetically modified Triffids in our gardens and our lexicon.

Wyndham wrote science fiction for those who really didn't want to read it. Indeed, he hated the term, preferring "logical fantasy" for a genre that was still seen by many as either cranky or little better than porn. He fiendishly reinvented and refracted a nation's experience of the second world war: a shattered landscape where fire had rained down from skies criss-crossed by deadly rockets, where unspeakable things had happened and Britain had emerged victorious.

His series of logical fantasies began sensationally enough in 1951 with The Day of the Triffids. It made Wyndham an overnight success at 47. All his years of pulp struggle and a hated stint in advertising were swept away. The Kraken Wakes followed, melting our icecaps in the process, while The Chrysalids pondered a world of genetic imperfection. But The Midwich Cuckoos was to be his most immaculate and fiendish conception.

Wyndham had spent years chafing under the demands of the US pulp magazines he had written for under the name John Beynon. They always seemed to want sex with their rocket ships, something he had resisted vigorously. But with Midwich he unleashed many dark, libidinous nightmares.

Shaking off the dead hand of HG Wells's martians, he delivered a new invasion from outer space: an invisible act of mass extra-terrestrial rape that turns the lives of all those in ordinary, boring Midwich upside down. The women awake from the mysterious "dayout" and find themselves pregnant.

Their alien offspring grow terribly quickly, seek no love and begin to bend their adult charges to their will when still in nappies. It is a hive mind of little tyrants who, despite their penchant for gobstoppers, can shred minds at will and have mankind on their list.

Hardly surprising, then, that the Catholic Legion of Decency objected to attempts to film the book, with all its blasphemous implications, on American shores. MGM duly relocated the film to England, assigned an under-contract George Sanders and gave him relative newcomer Barbara Shelley as his screen wife. The studio considered it a quota quickie with a budget of just over £80,000 and a shooting schedule of only six weeks.

Enter director Wolf Rilla. He and his family had left Hitler's Germany in 1934, and he had abandoned a promising career at the BBC for the lure of film-making. Village remains the one true success of a career he abandoned to become a hotelier in France. He says: "What interested me was not to make a fantastic film but a film that was very real. To take an ordinary situation and inject extraordinary events into it."

Wyndham, with his yearning for logical fantasy, ought to have approved. He had always thought Midwich unfilmable with its gaggle of superchildren. But Rilla devised an ingeniously simple solution, slashing their number down from 58 to a dozen and giving them all identical blond wigs. "Now who remembers having their head clamped?" asks Rilla somewhat disturbingly of his Cuckoos, now plump and mature.

We have all just finished watching Village of the Damned in the very same hall that appears in an inquest scene in the film. The clamps, by the way, had been necessary to hold young heads in place for close-up sequences relying on the film's sole optical effect, those haunting, glowing eyes, deleted from the initial UK release by the censor.

Rilla chuckles. "People always ask how did I get such good performances out of you lot. Simple - I asked you to do nothing except be still and stare. Children fidget and are never still, and I wanted you all to be absolutely still and steady and just stare. Very unchildlike, and, of course, very unsettling."

Wolf and his murderous brood have come full circle on this afternoon in Letchmore. It is the first time they have ever seen the film together since they took their wigs off. An A certificate put paid to any of the children seeing their impact on the public.

"I don't think any of us were aware of it then," says Rilla, "but of course now they remind you of the Hitler youth, blond-haired Aryan children and all that. I'm convinced that was an unintentional subtext; after all, the war was still fresh in our memories. But none of us had any idea of the impact it would make."

MGM certainly didn't. The Cuckoos were almost still-born. Not scary or sensational enough thought the front office; they stuck the film on the shelf. But a gap in the release schedule saw Village of the Damned slip out unnoticed and unheralded. There was not even a press show. But by the end of the week, queues were forming around the one West End cinema showing it. By the time of the film's US release, MGM had spent three times the initial budget on a lurid publicity campaign that warned us to "Beware the Stare that Paralyzes!"

Rilla draws himself to his feet; the projector is being packed away and the Cuckoos are starting to file out. Almost wistfully, he says: "I've made 27 films and this is the only one people remember." But how many directors can claim to have terrified an entire generation?

· Mark Burman is the producer of Beware the Stare, which airs on Radio 4 next Thursday at 11.30am.